Downing Street Ignore Nature to Make Case for Vaccine

Do you remember your last cold? What was the first thing you did? Wrap up warm in bed and take vitamin C?

Over the last decade, there have been reports of respiratory viruses spreading within the UK, premature deaths, hospitalisations and use of ICUs. However, as the British Medical Journal asks in its rapid response, the government were dismissing these cases and excess deaths as “a bad flu season” or “the wrong strain of flu jab”.

The BMJ asks:

Government exaggerates flu mortality again: why cannot the public be trusted with the truth?

A research article published on PLOS in 2017 shows

“Prevalence of respiratory viruses among adults, by season, age, respiratory tract region and type of medical unit in Paris, France, from 2011 to 2016”

The research published on PLOS says “These data have important implications for the future development of vaccines and antiviral drugs.”.

In 2018, the Guardian newspaper wrote a long piece about why vaccines had not appeared for the ‘common cold‘. After saying why there were too many strains of rhinovirus to make a vaccine effective, that 5% of pharmaceuticals, with development consolidated between “Sanofi Pasteur, GlaxoSmithKline, Pfizer, AstraZeneca, Merck and Johnson & Johnson, among a few other smaller players,” Davidson writes,

“After the $1bn or so spent on development, there are also manufacturing and distribution costs to consider. There needs to be a return on the initial investment. “You sure as hell can’t do it if there’s not a market at the end, you’re wasting the company’s money, and if you do that too often, you’ll bankrupt the company,” Almond says.”

The Guardian, 6 Oct 2017, Nicola Davidson.

What is the business case for a vaccine against COVID-19? Yes we need to get back to normal and reboot the economy, but have the government been negligent in containing it? Could everyone have simply guarantined when they entered the UK, once the virus was announced in China in January 2020?

Laura Davidson, reporting in the Guardian quotes:

“Vaccines are usually injections administered on a single occasion, while drugs are taken for prolonged periods. And people don’t want to pay much for vaccines. “Everybody wants vaccines for pennies rather than pounds because you get them when you’re healthy,” Almond said. “Nobody wants to pay anything when they’re healthy. It’s like car insurance, right? But when you’re sick you will empty your wallet, whatever it takes.”

In her 2017 Article, Davidson reports that in 2003, Jeffrey Almond, a former professor of virology at Reading University who had been recently appointed as head of vaccine development at the pharmaceutical giant Sanofi, says:

Last year, in the UK, coughs and colds accounted for almost a quarter of the total number of days lost to sickness, about 34m. In the US, a survey carried out in 2002 calculated that each cold experienced by an adult causes an average loss of 8.7 working hours, while a further 1.2 hours are lost attending to cold-ridden children, making the total cost of lost productivity almost $25bn (£19bn) each year. Almond convinced his bosses that, if it were possible to make one, a rhinovirus vaccination would be financially viable. “Our back-of-the-envelope calculations on what we could charge, and what the numbers of sales could be, mean that it’s likely to be quite profitable and quite interesting for a company to develop,” Almond says.

Just to be clear about our rights, the USA’s Food and Drink Administration have released an Emergency Use Authorisation (EUA) for the Pfizer BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine, which comes in 2 doses, 3 weeks apart into the muscle.

Here is a quote from their factsheet (click link here to download):

1 Revised: December 2020 FACT SHEET FOR RECIPIENTS AND CAREGIVERSEMERGENCY USE AUTHORIZATION (EUA) OFTHE PFIZER-BIONTECH CO VID-19 VACCINE TO PREVENT CORONAVIRUS DISEASE 2019 (CO VID-19) IN INDIVIDUALS 16 YEARS OF AGE AND OLDER

You are being offered the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine to prevent Coronavirus Disease 2019 (C O VID-19) caused by SARS-CoV-2 .

This Fact Sheet contains information to help you understand the risks and benefits of the Pfizer-BioNTech C O VID-19 Vaccine, which you may receive because there is currently a pandemic of C O VID-19.The Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine is a vaccine and may prevent you from getting C O VID-19.

There is no U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved vaccine to prevent COVID-19.Read this Fact Sheet for information about the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine. Talk to the vaccination provider if you have questions. It is your choice to receive the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine.

Here is an after note:

We need to know what is going on. The FDA’s vote for Emergency Authorisation Use (EUA) provides more insight behind the scenes. This was reported on STAT news about giving vaccine to 16 and 17 year olds:

But to anyone who has followed many FDA advisory meetings, the conclusion of this one was surprising, and not in a good way. The final vote seems to have been influenced by one narrow issue: the inclusion of 16- and 17-year olds in the proposed emergency use authorization. Oddly, the FDA declined to reword the question — something the FDA has done in the past during in-person advisory committee meetings — when some panelists protested the inclusion of people younger than 18.

We don’t really know why the panelists voted as they did, though. Surprisingly, there was no opportunity for them to explain their vote afterward. Such comments are often every bit as important as the actual vote.

So why was there no opportunity for them to explain their vote afterwards? See whole article on Stat News.

Meanwhile, we now know that in the UK, we do not get enough sunlight to make Vitamin D for half of the year. We are (somewhat quietly and secretly) advised to take a Vitamin D3 or D2 supplement. Thanks to media funding from pharmaceutical companies warning people off taking dietary supplements as they are ‘not cures’, even educated people lose confidence and call supplements ‘expensive piss’.

Research has been widely done on Vitamin D and COVID-19, but government funding for Google also makes this hard to find. Here are these studies in one place.

There is also a large question mark over how post viral symptoms are regarded, in much the same way as when ME first became discussed in the academic and consumer press in the mid-to-late 1980s. This Jstor article shows the thinking was that it was combined mental and physical.